By Rough Weather
by Kshar
Summary: Days, or annuals, or minutes.


By Rough Weather

by Kshar

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of Sci Fi and L. Frank Baum. Used without permission, not for profit.

xx

He'd heard stories before, from people he met along the roads; from the others who resisted. "The suit will drive you mad in a heartbeat," they'd said in whispered tones, or "The voices they play in your head break through your eardrums and infect your brain."

He didn't believe them then and he didn't believe them now. People fill in the gaps between known and unknown. People write their own stories that help them sleep at night, or keep their children from straying. He doesn't believe everything he's heard, and he can't believe the things he's heard about the suits.

Or at least, most of his mind doesn't believe them. When the moment came; when his arms were held and his feet were kicked out from under him; when the Longcoats elbowed and shoved and knuckled him into place, there was a whispering ghost in a tiny, distant part of his head that believed far too much, believed only too well, believed everything was lost and the only future left was red-roaring-rushing madness in a dark metal cage, falling and falling and falling.

_I will die in here_, he thought, and was afraid.

When he opened his eyes, he saw in black and white and gray.

The suit closing around him made no sound, but for the sounds in his own head, and he bit his tongue hard to stop from speaking; from shouting or whimpering, he wasn't sure which it would be. The walls that closed around him smelled so metallic he could taste it in his mouth for a moment, until he was sealed inside, and then he tasted nothing.

And the memory started, spun in front of him and he was alone in the dark but also in the past, and he couldn't raise a hand, couldn't do a damn thing but watch and think.

He thought, and raged, and wept inwardly with the pain in his heart and the loss. The cage he was in--that his mind was in--didn't move a step. It took what seemed like a lifetime for him to realize that his feelings, his thoughts, his emotions didn't belong to him any more, didn't matter. He could be angry forever or weep forever and no difference would come of it. Not a thing would change.

_I will die in here_, he thought, and became determined.

Judging by the movement of the suns across the sky, he thought he had been in the suit for several hours when he first began thinking seriously about suicide. He started by trying to buckle his knees, to lie his weight on his throat as it rested on a metal support. It didn't work (simple words, as his father might have said mildly, looking over a project: "It didn't work"). The supports in the suit were close around his legs; shackles. He couldn't drop himself down an inch lower: he was locked into place.

He looked at the shadows of the suns, and thought, perhaps it had been days now, or annuals, or minutes.

He tried to move each part of himself, in between the big loops of missing time when the memory burned in his head, he searched for a sharp edge, a ridged part of the frame. He had time enough now to scrape his wrist along a seam until he bled to death and the scent would be like burned wire.

There was not a seam, not a ridge, not an edge.

I am the seam and the suit is the middle, he thought dizzily. I am the mechanical heart, keeping the shell alive. I am on a stone altar.

_I will die in here_, he thought before he thought no more, but even then, some other part of his brain told him, triumphantly, tragically, torturously, _No. You won't_.

Everything filtered down into gray snowflakes, and then he heard a rushing in his ears, like the sound of a thousand wings, and he understood, now, what people had been trying to explain to him; what the stories told.

xx

There are crosses in the cemeteries, even in the east. He knows about the One God; at least he knows what his mother taught him, about the soft kind man who claimed to be a person, to suffer like a person, but was safe, always kept safe.

He doesn't have a lot of time for people who are sheltered, kept soft, taken care of.

The One God got thrown by the roadside years ago. Folk now take their gods with a side of sacrifice, with blood and water and here is what you want, here is what you get. Their gods, his gods, would have their blood, and people would smile and be grateful. Or not smile, but harden their faces against the winter and cut another lamb's throat and try to hold on for a few more cycles of the moons, and try not to think about the fact that there were too many mouths to stretch the food between.

The cemeteries with their crosses and odd, winged statues that make him shiver sit next to fields strewn with tiny bones, both broken down and toughened by weather.

It is easier to live in this new world when you have lower expectations.

xx

The metal man opened to reveal a flesh-and-blood man, although covered in metal dust so that he looked silver. Boxes within boxes.

The man—the real man—stepped out on weakling legs and ran into his rescuer, slamming to the ground so that the wind was knocked out of both of them; hand to throat.

"I'll kill you," said the silver-real-flesh-and-blood man, through a gasp of air.

His rescuer took a painful breath and then another. "Well," said the rescuer finally. "You seem to be in charge of your faculties, more or less, so not all the rumors are true. Get up now, boy, the ground this morning's no place for an old man."

Jeb turned onto one side and then scrambled to his feet. "Mr Halloran," he said finally, recognizing the other man.

"Wouldn't be anyone else," said Halloran, standing up slowly and remaining half-bent while he dusted himself off. He looked carefully at Jeb, up and down. "That's from the suit, I'd guess."

"What's from the suit?" Jeb asked, shaking his head as though to clear it. The old man just inclined his head, and Jeb noticed the state of his clothes, and his skin, for the first time. He held up a silvered hand against the sky, and moved his fingers experimentally to see their powdery glint in the sunlight.

"Best get you cleaned up," said the old man. "The others are back a ways. Didn't know what we'd find here, and I didn't want the women seeing—well, just as well they stayed back." Halloran paused, and touched a hand to his forehead. "I buried your mother." He waved a hand to the side of the house, and Jeb saw a pile of fresh-turned earth, and the memory came back to him again, spun in front of him, and he felt like someone had struck him in the heart. He turned and went to his mother's grave, where he sank down on his knees and stayed.

xx

Halloran had made a grave marker of a slat of wood, and Jeb looked it critically for a while before he went to the cabin to fetch a knife. He wrote his mother's name into the wood with his blade, and he wasn't happy with the result, the choppy unskilled letters. He cut himself when he was carving the "C" and bled all over "Cain", which in hindsight he would think was appropriate. The only Cain whose blood remained unspilled could afford a small sacrifice.

There were none of the healing kama flowers she'd loved this far in the highlands, but he found white rosemary in a patch of hollow ground, and picked that to put on her grave. He made it as pretty and fine as he could for her. She hadn't had many comforts; not many pretty things.

She'd wanted a daughter, he remembered her telling him once, late and dark in front of a flickering fire. What had happened to his father had put an end to that dream, and she had mourned quietly for both her past and her future, never causing trouble; never making a fuss.

Jeb thought he would have liked a little sister, too. He breathed in the scent of fresh-turned grave dirt, and turned the knife over and over until it settled into a balance in his hand.

xx

Halloran assumed all this to be a silent conversation with the dead, and stood back accordingly, and chewed on a blade of grass for a while. He had been sorry--more than sorry, grieved--to find Adora Cain lying still with sightless eyes, the part of her that had held her body together long gone. He wasn't a great believer, though, that the dead could hear, so after a while he went to the house, started a fire, and heated some water over it. He didn't know what the gray dust covering the Cain boy signified, but he felt sure the boy would be better without it.

When the water was hot, he limped to the doorway and checked outside for the boy, who'd left his mother's grave and was sitting underneath a tree. He stood when he saw Halloran.

"Don't reckon I want to spend too much time underneath a roof for a while," said the boy. "I'll stay out here under the sky."

So Halloran brought him the water, grunting a little as he carried it. Jeb took the bucket from him and laid it on the ground, and then stripped off his clothes and began to wash.

"Just as well I didn't let the women along," said Halloran.

"I think I could still fight them off," said Jeb. And there was a hint of the boy's old arrogance back in the tip of his head, although his eyes were deep-circled with shadows.

"Think you're pretty smart, don't you," said Halloran. That was the thing about the boy, he thought. Keeps all his emotions, all his thoughts, all his feelings locked up tight. The son of a Tin Man, always in control, and had been ever since Halloran had met him, maybe aged twelve annuals and hunkered down beside a Resistance camp fire. The boy had been telling Adora—a worried-looking woman who Halloran would find out was much tougher than she looked—that they didn't have anything else to worry about. Halloran had thought at the time that everyone always had something else to worry about, but he'd held his tongue.

He'd kept an eye on the two of them that night, and later, when Adora was dozing tiredly a little back from the flames, he saw something in the boy's hand, glinting as he turned it over and over.

He'd approached the boy (who'd hunched over, hand protectively over hand) and asked, and Jeb Cain, eyes distrustful but ever the son of a Tin Man, ever respectful, held out in his hand a small metal horse.

Halloran had reached out a hand (thick-knuckled, even then--was there ever a time before his bones ached?) and touched the pointed ears with the pad of one finger. The toy was rough-hewn, the seams folded down by a blunt knife or clincher but not sanded, and not quite smooth.

"You should paint that," he'd told the boy, but Jeb shook his head silently; fingers curling up slightly, protectively around the horse's legs.

Halloran took his hand away. "It looks like a tiktok horse. Not real. Don't you want it to look real?"

"Black and white," the boy said, his eyes cast down, and Halloran was about to ask him what he meant when Jeb curled his hand all the way around the horse and then stepped back, dirty fist going to his pocket. Halloran was surprised at how flash-fast the boy, sleepy a moment ago, moved.

"It isn't real," the boy said slowly, and it sounds as if he was the one speaking to a child, as if their positions were reversed.

Halloran nodded, and it was a very long time, months later, before he said anything to the child again. He walked away from the fire and went to check on the rest of the group, on the rest of the new recruits and rescues.

xx

When Jeb had dried himself and dressed in clean clothes, he went to the well and threw the silver-dusted clothes down it.

"Could taint the water," Halloran grunted, disapprovingly.

"A chance I'm prepared to take," said Jeb, and Halloran looked at the boy's set face and the pulse in his jaw and thought it might be best to keep moving.

"Go catch your horse," he told the boy, and something like shock and remembering passed across Jeb's face. "Out the back in the field," Halloran went on. "Fine as the day it was born."

There's something about always living between places that strengthens the bond between a man and his horse. The gray whickered to Jeb as he approached, and Halloran stood back again as Jeb ran a gentle hand through the horse's mane.

And he looked away again, as Jeb saddled his horse and spoke to it in words that no-one else was meant to hear. Halloran untied his mule, and checked his saddle, tightened the cinch and then loosened it again. Rearranged saddlebags. Tightened the cinch again and looped Adora's horse's rein over his elbow.

"Time to go, boy," he said, finally, not looking at Jeb.

When he replied, Jeb's voice was clear and without a hint of what had passed here.

As they rode, they heard sounds in the distance; muffled but deep, like the ground itself was being ripped apart.

Jeb looked at Halloran with a question in his eyes, and Halloran yanked at the lead and cursed Adora's recalcitrant horse.

"Longcoats," he told Jeb. "They're along the bridge."

"What are they doing there?" Jeb asked him immediately, and when he received just a shake of the head in reply: "We should go find out."

Halloran shook his head. "We've got enough to do. We're going back to the camp."

Jeb looked frustrated, and the gray horse dipped his head and snorted as though in agreement with his master.

Halloran rode his mule, keeping his aching hands in loose fists around the reins, and ignored the boy. Ahead of them, the trees were thinning out, and the dense undergrowth with them, and a red bird flew out at them and swooped in front of the horses. Jeb's gray looked startled, and watched the bird fly away, with curious eyes and pricked ears. Leaves fallen from the trees lay thick on the ground, not yet replaced on the boughs. _The O.Z. changes_, Halloran thought, _turns in place and there's not one corner that's like another_. He wondered if he'd ever get to see it all, get to understand the way the land meets the sky in gentle, curving rhythm; get to know all of the kinds of animals and birds and their haunts.

"I think I dreamed," said Jeb, further down the trail. "Of the future, a thousand annuals ahead. What it would be like when I got out of the suit."

"They weren't never going to let you out of that suit, boy," said Halloran. "Once in, you don't get out until you're just bones."

"I heard things," said Jeb, hesitantly. "I dreamed--I dreamed things."

"Hmph," said Halloran, and thought about it for a moment. "Your age," he went on. "You're dreaming all night and half the day anyway. Don't keep talking about your dreams, boy, you need your head with you here."

Jeb looked at him, a line creasing his forehead, and Halloran reached over and gripped the boy's arm in one of his gnarled hands. He still had strength when he needed it, and he squeezed tight enough that the boy would feel it, although he did not flinch. "'Most every man's been put in a suit's still there, as far as I heard. You're out of it now. Don't go back in."

And Jeb pulled away from him, favoring the arm as though all his nerves were on the surface, and neck-reined his horse a few steps sideways from the mule.

Halloran watched him for a while, making certain the boy didn't have anything to say in reply, and then he gradually slowed down the mule and Adora's horse, just enough so that Jeb could ride a little in front. When the forest cleared enough, they could see the horizon ahead.

xx

End.

xx

Feedback of any kind will be gratefully received. Thanks for reading.

Kshar

February 2009


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